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Variety: “The first came when Dave Chappelle appeared onstage at 10:36 p.m. for an unannounced set. The second shocker: Chappelle kept telling jokes until 4:43 the next morning— making his entire set a whopping six hours and seven minutes. That’s the longest performance by any comedian in the the 28-year history of the Laugh Factory, according to founder Jamie Masada….Chappelle didn’t take any bathroom breaks. And Laugh Factory staff stopped serving alcohol around midnight, Masada said.”

Stop Anne Tyler before it’s too late. Otherwise, not bad.

Ellen Heltzel of The Book Babes raises an interesting point about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road:

Crace is among my favorite contemporary novelists (“Being Dead” is amazing and rightly won the National Book Critics Circle prize). “The Pesthouse,” while by no means surpassing “The Road,” is worthy in its own right. For one thing, it actually has a FEMALE character. For another, the ending seems to evolve more naturally from the story. In “The Road,” it feels as if McCarthy couldn’t sustain his hopeless vision and flinched.

While I don’t agree that McCarthy’s novel is about sustaining a “hopeless vision” (if anything, its purpose seems to me just the opposite), I am also troubled by the double standard in apocalyptic novels, where the protagonists are often men.

But it’s not just the “man’s man” quality of McCarthy that sets him apart from his peers, but the literary vs. genre divide. Much as Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America wasn’t the first novel to explore an alternate universe (although I do recall hoary-haired highbrows scratching their pates in wonder over Roth’s “innovations”), the apocalyptic novel was laid down before by writers as diverse as Robert A. Heinlein (Farnham’s Freehold), H.G. Wells (The Shape of Things to Come), Octavia Butler (the Parable books), David Brin (The Postman), Kurt Vonnegut (Cat’s Cradle) — too many quite frankly to list.

For those critics and enthusiasts now in the practice of declaring genre lesser or worthless, one must ask why top contemporary writers like Roth and McCarthy are using genre to sustain their literary worth.

Taxes plagued me this weekend, and I didn’t have the time to send in my thoughts, but Simon Owens has collected a number of tributes to Kurt Vonnegut.